Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics
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More than Nature Needs - Language, Mind, and Evolution (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,277
Discovery Miles 12 770
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More than Nature Needs - Language, Mind, and Evolution (Hardcover)
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Total price: R1,297
Discovery Miles: 12 970
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The human mind is an unlikely evolutionary adaptation. How did
humans acquire cognitive capacities far more powerful than anything
a hunting-and-gathering primate needed to survive? Alfred Russel
Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of evolutionary theory, saw humans
as "divine exceptions" to natural selection. Darwin thought use of
language might have shaped our sophisticated brains, but his
hypothesis remained an intriguing guess--until now. Combining
state-of-the-art research with forty years of writing and thinking
about language evolution, Derek Bickerton convincingly resolves a
crucial problem that both biology and the cognitive sciences have
hitherto ignored or evaded. What evolved first was neither language
nor intelligence--merely normal animal communication plus
displacement. That was enough to break restrictions on both thought
and communication that bound all other animals. The brain
self-organized to store and automatically process its new input,
words. But words, which are inextricably linked to the concepts
they represent, had to be accessible to consciousness. The
inevitable consequence was a cognitive engine able to voluntarily
merge both thoughts and words into meaningful combinations. Only in
a third phase could language emerge, as humans began to tinker with
a medium that, when used for communication, was adequate for
speakers but suboptimal for hearers. Starting from humankind's
remotest past, More than Nature Needs transcends nativist thesis
and empiricist antithesis by presenting a revolutionary
synthesis--one that instead of merely repeating "nature and
nurture" cliches shows specifically and in a principled manner how
and why the synthesis came about.
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